Talk:Centralia Note/@comment-4082233-20110619211721
it's me again. found a copy of the book. on page 124 of the pdf, the following dialogue occurs between John SHADE and Charles Kinbote, the UNRELIABLE NARRATOR. "SHADE: All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust and Sloth, poetry might never have been born. KINBOTE: Is it fair to base objections upon obsolete terminology? SHADE: All religions are based upon obsolete terminology. KINBOTE: What we term Original Sin can never grow obsolete. SHADE: I know nothing about that. In fact when I was small I thought it meant Cain killing Abel. Personally, I am with the old snuff-takers: L’homme est né bon. KINBOTE: Yet disobeying the Divine Will is a fundamental definition of Sin. SHADE: I cannot disobey something which I do not know and the reality of which I have the right to deny. KINBOTE: Tut-tut. Do you also deny that there are sins? SHADE: I can name only two: murder, and the deliberate infliction of pain. KINBOTE: Then a man spending his life in absolute solitude could not be a sinner? SHADE: He could torture animals. He could poison the springs on his island. He could denounce an innocent man in a posthumous manifesto. KINBOTE: And so the password is —? SHADE: Pity. KINBOTE: But who instilled it in us, John? Who is the Judge of life, and the Designer of death? SHADE: Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one. KINBOTE: Now I have caught you, John: once we deny a Higher Intelligence that plans and administrates our individual hereafters we are bound to accept the unspeakably dreadful notion of Chance reaching into eternity. Consider the situation. Throughout eternity our poor ghosts are exposed to nameless vicissitudes. There is no appeal, no advice, no support, no protection, nothing. Poor Kinbote’s ghost, poor Shade’s shade, may have blundered, may have taken the wrong turn somewhere — oh, from sheer absent-mindedness, or simply through ignorance of a trivial rule in the preposterous game of nature — if there be any rules. SHADE: There are rules in chess problems: interdiction of dual solutions, for instance. KINBOTE: I had in mind diabolical rules likely to be broken by the other party as soon as we come to understand them. That is why goetic magic does not always work. The demons in their prismatic malice betray the agreement between us and them, and we are again in the chaos of chance. Even if we temper Chance with Necessity and allow godless determinism, the mechanism of cause and effect, to provide our souls after death with the dubious solace of metastatistics, we still have to reckon with the individual mishap, the thousand and second highway accident of those scheduled for Independence Day in Hades. No-no, if we want to be serious about the hereafter let us not begin by degrading it to the level of a science-fiction yarn or a spiritualistic case history. The idea of one’s soul plunging into limitless and chaotic afterlife with no Providence to direct her — SHADE: There is always a psychopompos around the corner, isn’t there? KINBOTE: Not around that corner, John. With no Providence the soul must rely on the dust of its husk, on the experience gathered in the course of corporeal confinement, and cling childishly to small-town principles, local by-laws and a personality consisting mainly of the shadows of its own prison bars. Such an idea is not to be entertained one instant by the religious mind. How much more intelligent it is — even from a proud infidel’s point of view! — to accept God’s Presence — a faint phosphorescence at first, a pale light in the dimness of bodily life, and a dazzling radiance after it? I too, I too, my dear John, have been assailed in my time by religious doubts. The church helped me to fight them off. It also helped me not to ask too much, not to demand too clear an image of what is unimaginable. St. Augustine said — SHADE: Why must one always quote St. Augustine to me? KINBOTE: As St. Augustine said, "One can know what God is not; one cannot know what He is." I think I know what He is not: He is not despair, He is not terror, He is not the earth in one’s rattling throat, not the black hum in one’s ears fading to nothing in nothing. I know also that the world could not have occurred fortuitously and that somehow Mind is involved as a main factor in the making of the universe. In trying to find the right name for that Universal Mind, or First Cause, or the Absolute, or Nature, I submit that the Name of God has priority." so there we have it folks, SHADE's PASSWORD TO THE UNRELIABLE NARRATOR IS "PITY"! **Update** I just emailed the boys at everymanHYBRID@gmail.com explaining everything just as i explained it here. will be sure to update you all on any responses i get.